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From Vermont Wilderness School
The Human Blueprint:
Rediscovering the Nature of Learning
“It’s not dripping!” my daughter said expectantly. I drilled another half inch into the large Sugar Maple in front of the house. “Hmm, doesn’t seem to be flowing yet. Maybe it’s not ready today,” I said, a little uncomfortable after having drilled into the trunk of this living being. “We should sing it a song and then it will drip,” she said matter-of-factly.
At the age of two and a half, my daughter Lucia knows more about the ancient blueprint for learning than I do, so I humbly took her cue. “Ok, you start.”
“Maple tree, Maple tree, we love you, Maple tree, Maple tree we love you.”
I added, “We offer you thankfulness for all that you do.”
“Please please please……drip!” She turned as she finished this line, beaming her punctuation.
If I weren’t paying attention, I might miss the brilliance of the natural learning process. For millions of years our ancestors have nurtured and educated their children in such a way as to give highest chance of survival. Full awareness of their home place was essential. Imagine a million years of real world living. Like all animals these early humans were both predator and prey, subjected to the hazards, shifting food resources, and extreme weather. If they didn’t get things just right, if key knowledge wasn’t passed on to the next generation in the most effective way possible, there were dire consequences. Direct connection with nature shaped the human blueprint for learning, because we are nature.
From the beginning of Lucia’s life, my wife and I have paid attention to the elements of nature around us, and our connection to them.
My wife Luz Elena sings a Spanish love song to the full moon. We’ve been singing with Lucia from the beginning. Today the sap is not flowing like it should and she instinctively knows that singing an appreciation to the tree will somehow fulfill her part in the continuance of creation.
I imagine human beings have been singing these songs for millennia, as part of being intimately connected to a place. Only relatively recently in human history have we diminished our relationship to the natural world. Indeed, in the past two generations we’ve seen alarming changes in this respect. Children once roamed the land their parents and grandparents grew up on.
Timeless wandering outdoors was synonymous with childhood. Places on the land had names and stories, passed on from generation to generation, like “Huckleberry Swamp” and “Ginseng Hollow.”
Today’s children spend ten hours per week strapped into a car seat traveling at fifty miles per hour. They spend thirty hours per week on average immobile in front of a TV, computer, or video game. Children in middle school have day-planners and full schedules; they don’t know where their food comes from anymore. Worst of all, they don’t know that they don’t know. This results in absurd moments such as the one described in this passage from Sara Stein’s book, Noah’s Children: Restoring the Ecology of Childhood:
“Broccoli in bud, before the flowers have opened, is the vegetable we eat, and what with all the fuss that’s been made about its healthy properties, you’d think any schoolchild would recognize it in that state. Not so, according to an art teacher who brought in a bag of fresh produce for a lesson in still life only to find that the subjects were mostly alien to her class. Few recognized the head of broccoli, or whole peppers either or peas in a pod. I wouldn’t have believed the story if I hadn’t witnessed the education of a young woman from California who had never seen a carrot in the raw. From California! The woman had been raised on frozen vegetables. In her slender experience, carrots were orange cubes, rounds or slivers. She was surprised to discover that they were roots.”
The cost is high. Not only are the children more and more disconnected from real experiences in nature, but they also inherently lose the ability, the art of mentoring, to pass on this experience as knowledge to the next generation. It’s like slowly falling asleep in the late stages of hypothermia.
Luckily, our ancestral connection to nature and our human blueprint for learning can be reawakened by literally coming to our senses. The six human senses (including intuition) developed during the millennia as a result of direct contact with the natural world. If we stimulated these senses, our ability to perceive the world around us increases dramatically. The more we perceive, the more we are curious, and seek to know the natural world. The more we know nature, the stronger our connection to it. As humans, our bodies are designed to take in information from the natural world as if our life depended on it. The need to know strengthens the senses; complacency causes them to atrophy. To stimulate children’s senses we must allow them to have experiences in nature—and lots of them. It’s natural, this is the human blueprint. The magic of life sparks interest and enthusiasm.
Here are some activities to integrate into your family life. Remember, imitation is the strongest learning modality.
Child Nature Activities: Play with fire
This is safer than you might think, and very important. Having children around fire promotes respect and understanding for this force of nature. Show them how to light matches and candles, teach them to put sticks on fires or in fireplaces. Most of all, emphasize the importance of carefully tending a fire. Tell them stories of getting burned, being warmed, saving life and taking life.
Make a fire ring in the backyard if you can, or go to a park and have a campfire. Hanging around the fire at night is one of the oldest human traditions. Set up a tripod, an old pot and boil down maple syrup when the season rolls around. The need for fire in order to make maple sugar provides a great opportunity to teach kids how to tend fire. In the end perhaps they will learn to tend the fire within themselves.
Child Nature Activities: Hunt and Gather
Go out and collect things. Create a need for an edible plant or berry and search for it outdoors with your child. Once you’ve found some, and your child can confidently identify it, you can send him or her out to collect more for you. Avoid anything with poisonous look-alikes. A good rule of thumb for wild edibles: only eat something in the wild if you are 100% sure it is safe, and avoid all mushrooms.
At my house we collect yellow dock seeds (the rusty brown seeds that stand through the beginning of winter) because Momma needs them to cook our pancakes. We gather chives for the salad and Rhubarb stalks for the pie. Some days I might send my daughter out at three different times to gather food for the family to eat. Even at the age of two and a half, she can unerringly gather a dozen things that grow around the house.
Child Nature Activities: Provoke Mysteries
Find an animal’s hole or burrow and ask questions about what could live in there. You can even make up stories together about who might be inside.
Find a set of tracks (sand or snow is easiest) and follow them. Who made them? Where are they going? When were they made? When you begin learning about the local animals around your home, remember that these are individuals that have established a territory. That gray squirrel is probably the same gray squirrel you saw yesterday. Name it, make it part of the family. Those opossum tracks belong to the family ‘possum. For some reason it likes you, so you might as well include it as kin.
When in your home area, always challenge yourself to go new ways and look at new things. Ask lots of questions, especially open-ended ones. This will stimulate impulses to explore, resolve and discover and will also lead to more questions. A folk adage states, “ If we fish for them they will eat for a day, if they learn to fish for themselves, they will eat for a lifetime.”
Child Nature Activities: Tell Stories
Humans are natural storytellers. At bedtime, recount adventures and scenes from the day. This is how our ancestors taught our children. Storytelling fosters imagination and creativity, and reinforces the natural mysteries we learned during the day.
Child Nature Activities: Activate the Senses through Hiding Games
Yell, “ Try and find me!” then run off and hide. (This works great in snow or sand—remember, you’re not trying to win!) Try hiding in obvious spots, wearing bright colors, or making lots of noise as you’re hiding. If they pass close by, whisper “Boo!” Playing hide and seek is actually practice play for hunting and gathering, and helps hone children’s senses.
Hide with your child in a thicket of bushes and watch for or evade imaginary creatures. Sit silently for as long as you can, then bolt out to another place and do it all over again. Children love it if you pretend to be an animal family--chipmunks, squirrels, or rabbits hiding from hawks or coyotes. This game can grow into the adventure of sneaking up on animals, observing them in their natural state. The art of walking slowly and quietly builds capacity for taking in life’s subtleties.
Child Nature Activities: Encourage Free Play Outdoors
Put a tent in the backyard and encourage children to sleep outdoors. Prepare them for any weather they might encounter so they can play all day. Let them make forts, tree houses and clubhouses, and encourage them to play in dirt and mud and fully immerse themselves in nature, even if it means getting completely wet in all the wrong clothing in nice weather.
Child Nature Activities: Explore the Senses
Sound: Find the nearest source of water in your neighborhood by cupping your hands behind your ears. Strong imagination sparks the senses, so pretend you are forming “deer ears” with your hands. It’s surprising how far the sound of running water will carry. Listen for frogs and other water insects—even from your car. When you find it a source of water, sit and listen.
Sight: Gather tadpoles, a willow shoot, or an unopened rose bud and put them in water on your kitchen table. Pay close attention and watch the subtle changes over time. Name them, and talk to them as though they are your new children now, and encourage everyone to care for them. (Tadpoles like fresh lettuce). Encourage gathering things. Honor the presence of each new discovery by displaying it in a prominent place in your home and asking your children questions about its journey.
Smell: Teach your kids to smell everything. See if you can do it without telling them. Don’t say: "Smell this,” just smell it yourself, often, and make the pleasure of it obvious. When you step outside, bend low to the ground and smell the dew soaked grass, especially when it is freshly cut. And remember that disgusting smells go over very well with children.
Taste: Find berries! In late spring and summer, they are everywhere. Or simply buy them and eat berries with your children outside, right on the steps or on the lawn. Tell them stories of eating berries when you were young. Did you pick them? With whom? Relate your best childhood memories—your kids will eat them up faster than the fruit.
Touch: Use the weather. Ask your child what direction the wind usually comes from around your home. The compass doesn’t matter, just have them feel and point. Together, face the wind—what landmarks are in that direction? If the air is cold, are you facing North? Also, when it rains, don't run for shelter right away. Close your eyes, smile and feel the magical gift of the rain on your faces.
We play these activities at home and at Vermont Wilderness School to reawaken our human blueprint for learning. Magical things happen when you open up to this instinctive and ancient way of learning.
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That day, Lucia and I sang the Maple Tree Appreciation Song fourteen times, mostly because we liked it and wanted to remember it. When we went back to the tree at the end of the day to sing one more time before bed, the sap had begun to flow.
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Mark Morey is co-founder and executive director of Vermont Wilderness School, a non-profit organization dedicated to mentoring youth in the arts of nature, awareness and community. He can be reached at Vermont Wilderness School, whose programs cover many child nature activities.
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